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Shoutout to the old blueprint archive at the library in Tacoma
I was there yesterday and saw they still have the original linen sheets for the city's first water treatment plant from 1912, which made me think about how much cleaner our digital lines are now, but maybe we lost something in the feel of the work, anyone else get that vibe looking at old hand-drafted stuff?
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willow_king6mo ago
Totally get what you mean about the feel of the work. There's a weight to those old linen sheets you just don't get with a PDF. My own attempts at hand drafting back in school looked like a toddler with a ruler, so maybe it's for the best we moved on. But you can't help but admire the patience and skill that went into every single line. The smudges and little imperfections are like a signature. Makes our perfect digital stuff feel a bit sterile by comparison.
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matthew_reed506mo ago
Spot on about the feel, but I have to correct one thing. Those old sheets weren't usually linen. In my experience, they were often vellum, which is a treated animal skin, or later a heavy tracing paper. The texture was totally unique, kind of waxy. You're right that the skill was unreal, and every smudge told a story about the hours spent. It makes our undo button feel like a cheat code sometimes.
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grant.luna4mo ago
You're right about vellum and tracing paper. I've seen some of those old vellum sheets in a museum collection and they're something else. But I have to disagree a bit about the smudges and imperfections being charming. I spent years working in a restoration firm and those "signatures" were often just dirt or grease from someone's hands. It's not always romantic. The precision of digital tools means no one has to guess if a line is an intentional mark or a coffee stain. I do miss the physical act though, that scratch of a pen on paper. But I'll take a clean PDF over a stained original any day for actually doing the work.
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